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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Liberalism, Part III
Message-ID: <363@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Mar-86 22:46:22 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.363
Posted: Sat Mar  8 22:46:22 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Mar-86 00:14:38 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 149
Summary: 

I will make a stab at explaining the basic meaning of "liberalism"
past and present.  Since Ronald Dworkin can do this much better than
I can, I will let him do the talking.  The excerpts below are taken
from his essay "Liberalism", which appears in both *Public and
Private Morality*, ed. Stuart Hampshire, and *Liberalism and Its
Critics*, ed. Michael Sandel (the latter is a very useful volume).  

Liberalism, says Dworkin, is based on the belief that government must
treat all its citizens with equal concern and respect:  as free,
independent, and with equal dignity -- a belief shared by American
(US) conservatives.  But the liberal also believes that government
must be neutral on "the question of the good life," and denies that
government must operate on a theory of what human beings ought to be:
_____________

The [liberal] theory of equality supposes that political decisions
must be, so far as it is possible, independent of any particular
conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life.  Since
the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, the government
does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to
another, either because the officials believe that one is
intrinsically superior, or because one is held by the more numerous
or more powerful group. ...

Suppose that a liberal is asked to found a new state.  He is required
to dictate its constitution and fundamental institutions.  He must
propose a general theory of political distribution, that is, a theory
of how whatever the community has to assign, by way of goods or
resources or opportunities, should be assigned.  He will arrive
initially at something like this principle of rough equality:
resources and opportunities should be distributed, so far as
possible, equally, so that roughly the same share of whatever is
available is devoted to satisfying the ambitions of each.  Any other
general aim of distribution will assume either that the fate of some
people should be of greater concern than that of others, or that the
ambitions or talents of some are more worthy, and should be supported
more generously on that account....

But what does the principle of rough equality of distribution require
in practice?  If all resources were distributed directly by the
government through grants of food, housing, and so forth; if every
opportunity citizens have were provided directly by the government
through the provisions of civil and criminal law; if every citizen
had exactly the same talents; if every citizen started with no more
than what any other citizen had at the start; and if every citizen
had exactly the same theory of the good life and hence exactly the
same scheme of preferences between productive activity of different
forms and leisure, then the principle of rough equality of treatment
could be satisfied simply by equal distributions of everything to be
distributed and by civil and criminal laws of universal
application....

Of course, none of these conditions of similarity holds.  But the
moral relevance of different sorts of diversity are very different,
as may be shown by the following exercise.  Suppose all the
conditions of similarity I mentioned did hold except the last:
citizens have different theories of the good and hence different
preferences.  They therefore disagree about what product the raw
materials and labor and savings of the community should be used to
produce, and about which activities should be prohibited or regulated
so as to make others possible or easier.  The liberal, as lawgiver,
now needs mechanisms to satisfy the principles of equal treatment in
spite of these disagreements.  He will decide that there are no
better mechanisms available, as general political institutions, than
the two main institutions of our own political economy:  the economic
market, for decisions about what goods shall be produced and how they
shall be distributed, and representative democracy, for collective
decisions about what conduct shall be prohibited or regulated so that
other conduct might be made possible or convenient.  Each of these
familiar institutions may be expected to provide a more egalitarian
division than any other general arrangement....

In a society in which people differed only in preferences, then, a
market would be favored for its egalitarian consequences.... But we
must now return to the real world.  In the actual society for which
the liberal must construct political institutions, there are all the
other differences [talents, inheritance, handicaps]....

These inequalities will have great, often catastrophic, effects on
the distribution that a market economy will provide.  But, unlike
differences in preferences, the differences these inequalities make
are indefensible according to the liberal conception of equality.  It
is obviously obnoxious to the liberal conception, for example, that
someone should have more of what the community as a whole has to
distribute because he or his father had superior skill or luck.  [In
other words, the liberal lawgiver must, on his own principles, reject
an institution or principle of distribution which has this effect.
Dworkin is not claiming that wealth "belongs" to the community before
it is distributed, but rather that it gets distributed *somehow*,
willy-nilly; so what is the principle by which wealth *should* be
distributed?]  The liberal lawgiver therefore faces a difficult
task....

The liberal must be tempted, therefore, to a reform of the market
through a scheme of redistribution that leaves its pricing system
relatively intact but sharply limits, at least, the inequalities in
welfare that his initial principle prohibits.  No solution will seem
perfect.... In either case, he chooses a mixed economic system --
either redistributive capitalism or limited socialism -- not in order
to compromise antagonistic ideals of efficiency and equality, but to
achieve the best practical realization of the demands of equality
itself.  ...

[The liberal] must now consider the second of the two familiar
institutions he first selected, which is representative democracy.
Democracy is justified because it enforces the right of each person
to respect and concern as an individual; but in practice the
decisions of a democratic majority may often violate that right,
according to the liberal theory of what the right requires.  Suppose
a legislature elected by a majority decides to make criminal some act
not because the act deprives others of opportunities they want, but
because the majority disapproves of those [political] views or that
sexual morality.... The decision invades rather than enforces the
right of citizens to be treated as equals....

How can the liberal protect citizens against that sort of violation
of their fundamental right? ... The liberal, therefore, needs a
scheme of civil rights, whose effect will be to determine those
political decisions that are antecedently likely to reflect strong
external preferences, and to remove those decisions from majoritarian
political institutions altogether.... The rights encoded in the Bill
of Rights of the US Constitution, as interpreted (on the whole) by
the Supreme Court, are those that a substantial number of liberals
would think reasonably well suited to what the US now requires....

He has available, in the notion of procedural rights, a different
device to protect equality in a different way.  He will insist that
criminal procedure be structured to achieve a margin of safety in
decisions, so that the process is biased strongly against the
conviction of the innocent....

So the liberal, drawn to the economic market and to political
democracy for distinctly egalitarian reasons, finds that these
institutions will produce inegalitarian results unless he adds to his
scheme different sorts of individual rights.  These rights will
function as trump cards held by individuals; they will enable
individuals to resist particular decisions in spite of the fact that
hese decisions are or would be reached through the normal workings of
general institutions that are not themselves challenged.  The
ultimate justification of these rights is that they are necessary to
protect equal concern and respect; but they are not to be understood
as representing equality in contrast to some other goal or principle
served by democracy or the economic market.  The familiar idea, for
example, that rights of redistribution are justified by an ideal of
equality that overrides the efficiency ideals of the market in
certain cases, has no place in liberal theory.... --Ronald Dworkin
[To be continued]
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes